This invention relates to a golf club head and more particularly to an improvement of a utility iron.
Long irons, low lofted irons, often provide a challenge to some golfers because the low loft of the club causes the golf club head to be in a more upright position. This upright position raises the center of gravity of the golf club head making it more difficult to elevate a golf shot because more weight of the golf club head is located above the center of gravity of the golf ball. To address this problem, many high handicap golfers will chose to use fairway woods instead of long irons. Fairway woods generally have a lower center of gravity to make elevating the golf ball easier. However, fairway woods are also usually longer and the design of the club head makes controlling the rotation of the club head more difficult. Therefore, fairway woods are generally less accurate than long irons.
To address the problems of both long irons and fairway woods, two types of golf clubs have been designed, utility woods and utility irons. Utility woods typically have a hollow interior and the same general shape as a fairway wood (toe of the club is roughly the same height as the heel of the club), but the head of a utility wood is generally smaller than that of a typical fairway wood. The smaller head helps lower the center of gravity; however, utility woods still retain the same characteristics that make them less accurate than long irons.
Utility irons also have a hollow interior, but they retain the general shape of an iron (the toe of the club is generally higher than heel of the club). The advantage to this head design is that it reduces club face rotation for golf shots that are hit either on the toe and the heel of the golf club and therefore generally makes utility irons more accurate than utility woods.
There are two deficiencies with the utility irons that are currently manufactured. First, utility irons fail to utilize a face design in which the face of the golf club head has different thicknesses. A spring-like or trampoline effect occurs when the face flexes inward upon initial contact with the golf ball and flexes outward as the ball loses contact with the face generating a higher initial velocity of a golf ball than if the face did not flex. The amount that the face of a golf club flexes is measured by the Coefficient of Restitution (COR). The higher the COR, the more flex the face will have and therefore the greater the initial ball velocity will be. To increase the COR in irons, some manufactures have developed a variable face thickness in which the back side of the face is dome shaped so that the face is thicker in the middle. However, this design is inefficient because it reinforces areas unnecessarily, which both decreases the COR and prevents that weight from being distributed to either increase the moment of inertia or to lower the center of gravity. The second deficiency of current utility irons is that the center of gravity of most utility irons is still too high for some golfers to effectively use these clubs. Because it is necessary to maintain an effective swing weight of a golf club, it is impractical to simply attach a large weight across the entire sole of the golf club. This invention provides an innovative solution to both of these problems.